Now that he has Rufus and Joan performing at ever-higher levels, Drew is turning his attention to Wanda. When he first came onboard, he had naturally just assumed that, as the slowest member of the team, Wanda was simply unmotivated. Now he’s not so sure that there aren’t other issues slowing her down. For one thing, she doesn’t seem to know what kind of running shoes to wear, in order to light a fire in her step. And she has pacing issues, the kind of thing you could correct just by repeating a jump-rope rhyme to yourself until the rhythm becomes second nature to you. One day, he puts the bus on autopilot so he can run alongside Wanda and show her a few simple little tricks . . . and the results are fantabulous!
Sometimes I wonder how many Walkers grew up without a role model who could demonstrate a strong work ethic. For me, that role model was my mom. She worked all day, every day, at a $28K job, and then many nights a week I’d see her sitting at the kitchen table at home till eleven at night working on the company’s payroll. She didn’t get paid extra for this. She just wanted to make sure everything was perfect, that everyone’s hours were totaled just right, and that all the withholdings were accurate. At one point, my mom had accrued 572 hours of overtime for which she could have requested a check. When I turned sixteen, she wanted to help me buy a car, a run-down, cheap 1979 yellow Ford Pinto so that I could have transportation to a job washing dishes at a local restaurant. She asked her company for $600 in overtime pay. They gave it to her, $600 for 572 hours of time. I said to her, “Mom, that is like a dollar per hour. Mom, that’s horrible. Why would you take so little money?” She said, “Because it wasn’t about the money. I wanted to do a good job and no one approved for me to work those hours; I just did it because it needed to be done.” So I grew up witnessing that type of work ethic firsthand.
When you’re the Driver in an organization and you have a Walker on your team, you need to be very clear about demonstrating your values. You have to show them, This is what I expect. This is how Runners perform. And for some of them, it may be like they’re seeing it for the first time.
I personally can remember what it’s like to see positive, effective behaviors modeled for me in a way I could emulate. When I was seventeen years old, I started waiting tables at a pizza restaurant called The Legend. I thought I was a great waiter. I thought I was the best. Miss Brenda, the manager, actually told me I was the best waiter on her staff. Then I left and went to work for The River Forest Manor, and there was a server there named Cindy who was just phenomenal. She was engaging. She laughed and joked with the customers. She just had a way about her. I noticed that when Cindy took an order, she listened and looked the customer right in the eye, instead of looking down at a notepad. It was an emotional connection. I thought to myself, I’m going to start doing that. And once I did, my tips improved and I got better at connecting with the customers. And yet, I had started out thinking I was already great, but I just didn’t know any better because I had never seen anything better. I had actually been a Walker without realizing it.
So you might have some Walkers in your organization, and you’re really frustrated. You want them to jog, you want them to run. Why won’t they? Sometimes it just comes down to this: they just don’t know what they don’t know. In some cases, if you can demonstrate a more effective way of doing things, a Walker is going to move faster for you. Of course, the success of this strategy depends on the willingness and ability of the Walker to learn, grow, and improve and it probably works best with younger workers who have ambition and potential but need some help to get up and running.
Now Riders are a different story. I honestly just want to tell you to fire all of them and move on to the next chapter, but I know that can sometimes be difficult to do, particularly in areas like education, where the tenure process protects ineffective teachers like an iron fortress. It may be possible to get a Rider to walk. But remember way back in chapter 5, where I told the story about the teacher who sat all day on the “stool of drool” and drove her students into a coma? I put a lot of effort into getting her up off that stool, only to see that my efforts and my minimal results had virtually no effect at all on the organization as a whole. When it comes to the Riders on your team, you’ll have to decide for yourself if it’s best to kick them off the bus or if you think they are capable of improving to the point they make a worthwhile contribution.
One of my favorite strategies for maximizing the contributions of Walkers and Riders is to delegate the grunt work to them. When everyone else is running at top speed and we have many miles yet to go in order to accomplish a goal, the Walkers and Riders are the most expendable members of the team. I’m not going to pull a Runner off course to have her pump the gas, for example, so I’m constantly directing the Walkers to those tasks. When they don’t volunteer to do them, I’m quick to say, “Hey, could you help us out?,” “Could you do that?,” “Would you mind?,” “If you could take care of that, that’d be awesome.”
When it comes right down to it, you, as the Driver, are the best person to decide how to deal with the Walkers on your team. Some of them probably have potential, while others may not. You have to weigh the effort it will take to get them to pick up their feet and then decide if your time and energy would be best used elsewhere.